When buying or selling a camera, one of the first questions to come up is “What’s the shutter count?” and for good reason. Since shutters are a wear-and-tear part with a limited lifespan and can be expensive to repair, shutter count factors heavily into a camera’s value. For each manufacturer, there are different methods to view a camera’s shutter count, and one that is popular with Canon cameras is the use of third-party apps.

EOS Inspector, available for $2.99 via the Mac App Store, has long been one of the more popular choices for viewing Canon shutter counts on Macs, and they’ve released a new version that supports newer cameras and adds new features.

EOS Inspector 2.0

The app was re-implemented from scratch using the brilliant Swift language

Support for the modern Canon EOS cameras (such as the 1D X Mark II, 5D Mark IV and 5DS) has been added

Live View related shutter actuations are displayed when possible

Shutter count is shown along shutter’s rated lifespan so you can see the percent of its wear

For selected EOS cameras separate values for photos taken through the viewfinder, photos taken via the Live View and a number of Live View sessions are presented on the detalization bar

Value fields are made selectable so you can easily extract the data you need

Sharing menu allows you to quickly share the most valuable details about you camera

It’s now possible to edit the owner, author and copyright settings of your camera

The issue with serial numbers sometimes being shown as negative values has been fixed

We took it for a quick test spin, and found EOS Inspector easy to use, but it may have dubious Live View actuation readings on older cameras. The cameras tested were a 6D Mark II and a 5D Mark II, and the 5D Mark II’s results were highly questionable.

Still, the regular shutter count looked right. It unfortunately just renders some of the new features useless for older bodies, or at least this particular body. In EOS Inspector’s chart of the 65 cameras supported, it marks the 5D Mark II as “it depends” for Live View count, so perhaps that’s what that means.

Q&A Discussions

Hi, Holly! Konstantin, the developer of EOS Inspector here. First, thanks for the great review! One of my objectives for making this app was giving people an easy way of estimating a value of used cameras so they can make deals with more confidence. I appreciate that you’ve covered this use-case too!

Regarding that questionable 5D Mark II Live View actuations counter… I am aware of it. This is the reason why it marked as “It depends” in camera compatibility table. From the excessive public beta testing that had place before the app hit the store it became obvious that 5D Mark II has problems with SC + Live View counter consistency. Most often it is a couple of thousands shots lower than a plain shutter count, which doesn’t make sense at all. While I am just sure that EOS Inspector extracts the right memory cell and decodes it in a proper way I can’t influence how camera maintains its internal counter.

Would you please share with me a screenshot of the first information pane when your 5D Mark II is connected? I might need to know the firmware version of your device. Does this 5D Mark II have ever been to service center? And also, did you have any issues with your other camera, 6D Mark II? Thank you!

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